SCALE (Safe Community Awareness and Alerting Network) is a cyber-physical system (CPS) leveraging the pervasive Internet of Things (IoT) to extend a smarter, safer home to all residents at a low incremental cost. SCALE uses novel networking technologies, commodity sensor devices, cloud services, and middleware abstractions to sense, analyze, and act on sensed events in a distributed manner. It monitors environmental factors (i.e. smoke, explosive gas) and automatically alerts residents via phone upon discovery of a possible emergency, enabling them to confirm the event and contact emergency dispatchers with minimal effort. SCALE2 is the second phase of SCALE with multiple deployments.

SCALE2 is a community government/academic/industry partnership effort that aims to deploy, actuate and evaluate techniques to support multiple heterogeneous IoT technologies in real world communities. Through SCALE, significant public benefits can be enabled in the areas of emergency preparedness/response at the individual and community scale. The SCALE2 end-to-end IoT platform leverages cheap off the-shelf sensors and communication platforms for a broad range of applications. SCALE2 has been successfully deployed in the Victory Senior Housing facility in Montgomery County, MD for a wide variety of sensing applications, such as personal safety, building/space safety, seismic activity, fire events and environmental monitoring (air quality). It entails assorted access network technologies and their integration into a common platform for resilient data collection. SCALE2 technologies are also deployed in Irvine, California where it leverages the I-Sensorium testbed in UC Irvine and the surrounding community in efforts focusing on building safety/security and campus-level activities. Efforts are underway to deploy and utilize SCALE2 platforms in other nations around the world, including Taiwan and Bangladesh for community scale IoT efforts.

Goals and Overview

• Extend a connected safe home to everyone at a low incremental cost
• Automatically detect emergency events, alert residents, confirm emergency via phone or app, and initiate contacting first responders
• Jump-start a live testbed for identifying and researching Internet of Things (IoT) challenges
• Connect disparate systems via an open multi-protocol data exchange
• Bring together key industry, academic, and government organizations to brainstorm, share ideas, and collaborate on prototype systems
• Expand community awareness and involvement in safety and IoT

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